heroscapelordsfandomcom-20200213-history
Durnipia
One of the problems right away with this card was the name. It has no effect on game play, true, but its unremarkable, unpronounceable and unrememberable; and I keep confusing it with Kaemon Awa's name since Ana and Awa are so close. Plus Einar already has a healer, Durnipia. Now it had always been thought that Durnipia was a reptilian alien, but this only because the card bio that first mentioned her was Valguard, which says Durnipia gave him a alien lizard arm. Re-reading it, it doesn't actually say what Durnipia's species was and even mentioned that it was done by magic, not a very alien thing. Reading the Heroscaper.com forum, I read an interesting theory that Durnipia is a Kyrie, this makes sense in the context of Kelda, despite the very un-Kyrie sounding name of Durnipia. We will probably never know what species Durnipia was, however all we have to work with is the model Wizards of the Coast gave us. A female Einar healer. The solution to the name couldn't be more obvious. Ana had several problems with her card. First she was a human and she wielded magic. In Heroscape, humans are summoned from Earth, a real life historical Earth, which as we all know, magic doesn't exist. In Heroscape there are only three "magical" worlds, Feylund, Icaria and Valhalla itself. Therefore while humans can wield enchanted artifacts made from these worlds, no human as any innate magical powers or abilities. The simplest solution is to change her into an elf, a species which can have innate magic powers; however, Ana cannot be converted into an elf as you can clearly see one of her ears on her model, which is definitely non-elven. A second issue is the color they chose to give her skin. Its a pale-ish tone, not at all like the normal human skin tone on Heroscape human figuress. In fact one is tempted to say that perhaps she is an undead, such a revenant. However, there are no undead humans in the game for the same reason there are no magical humans, there is no particular explanation why an undead human would gain magical powers, plus an undead healer just seems wrong. An undead doesn't fit very well in Einar's Army theme either. Interestingly enough, the fix from this card is inspired from Guri-Onii's card (a card with ironically its own host of issues). Short version, Guri-Onii is a Cyclops with a Japanese theme overlaid on it. A sort of oriental Cyclops if you will. Taking a cue from that, we go convert Ana's species into a "Tennin". Now none of you have probably ever heard of a "Tennin", they are roughly equivalent to Greek Nymphs. Nymphs were minor-demi goddess associated with nature, either trees, or streams or mountains and the like. Tennin, which come from Japanese Buddhism, are unnaturally beautiful nymph-like females associate with Heaven and are often found on high mountain tops. Thus in one stroke we have fixed both her species and her magical powers problem and given her a Japanese theme to boot, perfectly meshing her into Einar's theme. I dislike giving her a species not found in the original game, but considering the model, there doesn't seem to be a way around this. Her status as a Unique Hero is fine and proper. Her rank of "cleric" is an obvious problem. Heroscape makes no mention of god or other divine beings, not even Norse gods like Thor and Odin. So having a D&D-style cleric in Heroscape just seems wrong and its not a class one will find in classic Heroscape either. So out it must go. I toyed with the idea of "Empress" to fit Einar's Imperialistic theme, but settled on "Lady" instead, which just seem to really fit the figure well, especially given its new heavenly-associated Tennin species. Merciful is an actual Heroscape personality and really fits a Lady Healer well, so that stays, obviously. Medium 4 status is actually common or normal sized humanoid females in Heroscape and is roughly the model's size as well. All good. No change is made to her stats, again, ideally we want to change as little as possible, so: Life: 5, Move: 5, Range: 4, Attack: 2, Defense: 3 and Point Value: 100. All stay the same. Powers is next on the list. Her Healing Word ability is simply awesome and may stay exactly the way it is. Protection from Evil Aura fits well with her heavenly-associated Tennin status and so may also remain exactly the way it is. But her last power is the so-called "Turn Undead Special Attack". This is not a very useful power, undead or no, a player is going to send their healer into combat if they can at all avoid it, especially a healer who you DON'T HAVE TO PUT ORDER MARKERS ON TO HEAL UNITS. The extremely short range of four also means the undead is going to be right on top of her, which easily puts it in range of the hero that is right adjacent to her being healed. "Turn Undead" is also just simply one of those horrible D&D misnomer as well, it sound like the ability should transform Ana into an undead, "to turn undead". The power ought to be called: "Turn Away Undead" or better yet: "Repulse Undead." To fix this, we are going to steal a power from Wildborn and give it to Ana instead: Arcane Riposte. This ability is passive, which means you don't need to put Order Markers on Ana's card to use it, which is good, because unlike other healers, Ana doesn't need Order Markers to heal other units. Arcane Riposte essentially gives her Counter Strike and Evil Eye combined together. An extremely Einar themed ability. Lastly we do her card over in an Swarm of the Marro jungle/vine style card that she ought to have as a truescape figure released after the second Master Set. And establish her planet of origin on the basic side as "Feylund", one of the magical worlds of Heroscape. Stats *Life: 5 *Move: 5 *Range: 4 *Attack: 2 *Defense: 3 *Point Value: 100 Abilities *'Arcane Riposte': When Durnipia rolls defense dice against a normal attack, all excess shields count as unblockable hits on the attacking figure. *'Protection From Evil Aura': All small or medium figures you control within 3 clear sight spaces of Durnipia add 1 to their defense dice when rolling defense against an attack from a figure who follows Utgar. Durnipia's Protection from Evil Aura does not affect Durnipia. *'Healing Word': After revealing an Order Marker on a wounded small or medium Hero figure you control that is adjacent to Durnipia, and before using any other special powers on any Army Card or Glyph, you may first roll the 20-sided die. If you roll a 1 - 12 nothing happens. If you roll a 13 or higher, remove up to 2 wound markers from that Hero's Army Card.